If you’re as chronically online as me, you may have seen the recent conversation surrounding “shower beer.” It’s taken off recently, and has it’s own twitter hashtag and Phoebe Bridgers lyric mention:
It is, in fact, exactly what it sounds like. Drinking a beer in the shower. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to it (warning for some NSFW shots), and there are even beers made to be drunk in the shower.
I’ll admit that I was skeptical. I’m no stranger to a glass of wine or a rum and coke in the bath, but the schematics of an open container in the bathtub is a lot different than an open container under running water.
I figured, if I was going to try this, I should make sure I’m doing it right. I wanted to give the experience a fighting chance.
Before going into the research, here are my stipulations:
- I was only going to use beer we had in the house. I wasn’t taking a trip to the liquor store in the middle of a pandemic to buy some overpriced IPA. Our options were slightly out-of-code Sam Adams or Budweiser.
- No hour-long showers or dramatic changes to my shower routine. A lot of articles described the shower beer as a time-saving situation, and I’m not keen on wasting water.
The science behind a shower beer is that both showers and drinking alcohol activate the pleasure centers in your brain, so combining the two things is a two-hit time-saving combo. Plus, who doesn’t like a cold beer when they’re hot?
Huffpost has an article with tips, a few of which I had to disregard (notably, finish the beer in the shower and don’t drink out of a glass container. Whoops!)
Despite the advice, I had a lot of concerns. Watery beer was one of them, especially since I don’t have a shelf in my shower to keep the bottle above the spray. I had to balance it on the side of the tub and pray. The other concern was the underlying fear of the bottle slipping out of my hand and ending up with broken glass at the bottom of my shower.
While I was in the shower I also discovered that my Sam Adams Summer Ale actually stopped being fresh in November of 2020. Whoops.
Once I figured out I could put the bottle beside my shampoo bottle without water pouring into it, the experience got a lot less stressful, and the fear of glass would be eliminated by drinking out of a can instead.
And there I was, standing in a hot shower, questioning the decisions I’d made that led me to cautiously eyeing up an open container to make sure it didn’t end up with shampoo in it.
Honestly? It was better than I’d expected.
I thought that the beer would warm up pretty quickly from the humidity, but it stayed cool the entire time.
It was a little bit like drinking a cold beer on a hot day, but if it were also raining incredibly hot water and you were naked.
There were a few downsides, one being that I don’t take long enough showers to drink an entire beer (that, or I don’t drink beer fast enough to finish it in the shower), so I only finished half of the beer by the time I’d finished showering.
That being said, it was, at the very least, a change, which is something I’ve been desperately hankering for after nearly a year of living through Groundhog Day.
So whether drinking a beer in the shower actually elevates the experience of drinking a beer, or if drinking a beer in the shower elevates the experience of taking a shower, I’m not sure. But it was nice to do something different for once.
So I vote: go for it. Even if you hate it, change can be good.
